A creature sits in the dark and is marked. On its brow, its breast, its tail, points of light have opened like wounds that do not bleed, and above its head hangs a lattice of jewelled nodes, half snowflake and half Indra's net, in which every bead reflects every other. The iconography is unmistakable: this is a saint. That the saint is a kitten, with paw pads the colour of a child's palm and a mouth set in a small uncertain seam, is the entire argument of the picture.
The image belongs to that late tradition in which the devotional panel has been emptied of its theology and refilled with tenderness. The gold ground of Duccio has become a black one, salted with faint stars; the halo has become a diagram; the saint's ecstatic upward gaze has become the level, enormous, unblinking regard of an animal that wants nothing from us and cannot be refused. Burke told us the beautiful was small, smooth, and gradually varied. Here that doctrine is pushed until it inverts, and smallness itself acquires the authority once reserved for the sublime.
What is being venerated is not the creature but the softness with which it is rendered: the blurred edge, the frayed brushwork, the refusal of any hard contour that might let us hold it at a distance. Cuteness, it turns out, is not the opposite of the sacred. It is the sacred after it has stopped demanding anything, after the wound has become a sparkle and the crown a constellation one could almost touch.
The lattice above its head is drawn with a geometer's precision. The animal beneath it is drawn as if through tears. The picture asks which of the two is the real portrait, and declines to answer on the grounds that the question was never sincere.
